


breaking into dust

by kwritten



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, POV Alternating, Shadows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 15:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4881469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt #138 'i don't want to be human. i want to be myself'</p><p>
  <i>His limbs feel loose, disconnected from his body, she makes him feel like that more often than he’d like to admit, like a puppet without its strings, like a dog without its leash. If only they knew the kind of power her bright eyes had over what they had left behind of his fragmented soul, battering around in his chest and demanding to be set free, if only they knew that he’d do anything she asked and it would almost feel like something he’d want to do anyway.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	breaking into dust

Consequences. 

That’s what they said. 

There will be consequences for your actions. That was the old mantra. Now, it’s kill or be killed and some days you’re fighting for your life and sometimes for your mother’s and sometimes you’re just fighting because someone with more stars on their shirt told you to. Sometimes you’re fighting because there’s nothing left to do, there’s no reason for it, that’s just all there is. 

_She read in a book once, buried in some of her mother’s old things, that a woman’s shadow is a four-legged companion, the darkness, the wild, always beside her, keeping pace with her. As a child, she took this very literally, called her shadow ‘Lottie’, tried to pet it as she went about her life, smiled at it as they wove their way through the shadows of trees._

Sometimes the reason is buried so deep behind their _consequences_ and their reasons and lost between your memory and your consciousness, that you don’t even realize you’re fighting at all. It all just feels like eating moldy bread and drinking stale water and staying alive. 

Maybe the truth is that it always felt this way, like there was someone else’s finger on the trigger and he was the gun, pointed this way and that, his own feelings on the matter just a more whimsical aspect of a game he wasn’t ready to play and would never be taught all the rules anyhow. At least before they made it seem like he mattered, made him _feel_ like there was a choice. Protect your mother, protect your father, protect the Republic, protect her, fight for something worth fighting for. 

_As she grew up, her shadow became a burden, it lost its wildness, its four-legged appeal, and began to look like the few memories she had left of her mother. Maybe this was her sign that she was so far deep in her own feral nature, that her shadow had had to compensate. A shadow is the darkness to compliment the light, the wild to allow the tame to flourish; she reversed the roles before she fully understood why they were necessary to begin with._

He feels whole buried deep inside of her, her long hair tickling his bare chest, his fingers digging into the sharp bones of her hips. He feels whole right in the moment when he doesn’t matter, when he isn’t sure there’s any meaning to it at all, when her eyes are closed and her head thrown back and he could be anyone, just anyone, isn’t that the biggest joke in his life?

_There’s a spark in her that cannot be contained, maybe she didn’t notice it when she was living the peaceful, normal life with her father and Danny, but now that she’s slogging through the dirt, washing blood off her hands night after night, she feels full of a fire that cannot be clenched. She can hear it in her voice, in the way words roll off her tongue, like she should be lapping up something much more solid, something to weigh her down. Like she’s made of the insubstantial material that makes up shadows, light passing over, nothing keeping her solid and steady._

That he feels irreplaceable in the one moment where he’s sure he is as transient as the wisps of clouds in the sky, floating by without a care in the world, on the verge of filling up, up, up with so much weight from the world below that they split apart with a great crash, leaving behind a flood that tastes like tears and feels like forgiveness, but isn’t. Rain, he knows from the Bible in the hall of his mother’s house, was God’s greatest curse, a reminder that the entire world could be taken away with just the gentle nod of a forgetful and vengeful father, the rainbow - a beam of light in the sky tricking your eyes into believing there was hope at the end - a gesture of an apology for a deed already lost to memory. 

_She feels solid the first time she lays her lips on his lips, feels like her touch might mean something other than death, like the fire inside of her is an asset instead of a curse. She feels solid when she takes him in her mouth, licking at him like this was what she was born to do, biting in just the right spot at just the right moment so that he lets out the most beautiful sound she has ever heard. So this is what it feels like to be made of a substance that doesn’t break apart in the wind._

“Why do we keep doing this?’ her voice is solemn and curious and frustrated. He doesn’t answer because he knows there isn’t one, he takes her hand instead and kisses her palm, as if they belonged to another time, as if that gesture could mean love, liberty, happiness or some other collection of words that make up a movement worth doing. His limbs feel loose, disconnected from his body, she makes him feel like that more often than he’d like to admit, like a puppet without its strings, like a dog without its leash. If only they knew the kind of power her bright eyes had over what they had left behind of his fragmented soul, battering around in his chest and demanding to be set free, if only they knew that he’d do anything she asked and it would almost feel like something he’d want to do anyway. 

_In the morning, her shadow pads after her on four legs and she doesn’t think to notice. He’s somewhere behind her, too. Always one step behind. Their shadows nuzzle at each other in the daylight, the way their bodies cling to each other in the dark. So this is what it feels like to be tamed, only she doesn’t notice, doesn’t see, too busy looking forward to see what trails behind._

“How’d you ever get out of those handcuffs anyway?” she’s straddling him, her teeth lightly grazing his earlobe. He wants to answer _I’m still there, still stuck in one spot while I watch your trail run cold._ He laughs instead, takes it for the joke that it is, lives in the moment the way she’s trying to teach him, tugging at the bottom of her shirt because clothes are so unnecessary in moments like this, moments trapped between battles like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. 

_She feels solid when his skin collides with hers. She doesn’t break apart, she doesn’t fade away, she doesn’t get sucked in - doesn’t become a part of him, tied, trapped, within him and unable to get out. She feels solid when he looks at her, like his gaze is keeping her feet on the ground when maybe she would have floated away otherwise. She feels solid because he’s somewhere and that’s enough, even when he isn’t two paces behind, he lives and so she stays on the ground. It isn’t love and it isn’t salvation, it feels like more and it feels like so much less than it should._

He feels whole buried deep inside of her, her strong thighs gripping his waist, her fingers tugging painfully at his short hair. He feels whole right in the moment when he loses himself completely, when he isn’t sure he’s real at all, when his eyes close and her lips brush his teasingly, knowingly, and he dissolves into a pile of nerves and signals firing across his brain telling him that _this_ is pleasure, and so it is.

Funny what a mind can do.

**Author's Note:**

> The book Charlie finds in Rachel's things is _Women Who Run with the Wolves_ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. If you haven't read this before, do yourself a favor and find a cheap copy, it's wonderful.


End file.
